As the paid search industry has evolved from the days of goto.com to Overture to Yahoo and the rise of Google Adwords all sorts of search engine marketing strategies have been suggested and debated. Bid management, writing effective ad copy and day parting are just a few worthy of mention. Yet among all of these tactics the one most fundamental of concepts is time and again overlooked, conversion tracking. Let this then be just a friendly reminder to track your campaign's target conversions and more specifically, all conversions.

A great example of the importance of tracking all available actions (and not just the most desired) is in one of Rock Coast Media's present campaigns. After a substantial period of time working through numerous technical challenges we were finally able to track call center sales in addition to just search driven online sales. All along we had some theories about the value of these calls but we were never sure...the result, over 40% of our sales were still over the phone. Clearly these numbers have substantially impacted the campaign's bottom line and our overall strategy.

Yes, the holidays are coming soon, 2008 planning is in crunch time and things in general are crazy. Hence, just this friendly reminder to review all of the available actions in your campaign and make sure they are properly tracked.

Labels: paid listings, paid search, PPC, rock coast media, search engine marketing, tracking online advertising